A packet flow entering a network is routed from one router to the next until the packet flow reaches its destination. At any given time, there may be many packet flows traversing the network between many different sources and destinations. To keep track of the packet flows, each router may establish a logical queue and a physical queue for each packet flow the router is forwarding. The logical queue is a logical construct established within software of the router to maintain order and keep track of the individual packets of each packet flow. For each logical queue, the router maintains a physical queue. The physical queue temporarily holds the actual packets themselves or pointers to memory locations within memory of the router where the actual packets are buffered. Thus, there is a one-to-one relationship between a packet flow, its corresponding logical queue, and the corresponding physical queue.
When a router processes multiple packet flows at a given time, parallelism in the hardware of the router itself can be leverage to quickly and efficiently forward inflows to corresponding outflows of multiple packet flows at a given time. However, when any one packet flow is dominant (i.e., consumes a majority of the router bandwidth) the serial nature of enqueuing and dequeuing packets to a single physical queue becomes a significant throughput bottleneck. In fact, single flow throughput performance is a common network benchmark tested by network administrators. Thus, known routers obtain maximum total throughput of packet flows when simultaneously processing multiple packet flows, of which, no one packet flow is dominant.
As bit rates across networks continue to climb, parallelism within routers is key to maintaining full bit rate communication. For example, in packet over SONET (“POS”) networks, maintaining optical carrier (“OC”)—192 bit rates (approximately 9,953.28 Mbps), requires leveraging hardware parallelism within network routers. As POS networks migrate to OC-768 (approximately 38.813 Gbps), maintaining hardware parallelism will become even more crucial.